


The Perks Of The Job

by Britpacker



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Episode Related, Established Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-30 06:55:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Britpacker/pseuds/Britpacker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being P.A. to Malcolm Tucker means a ringside seat during a ministerial crisis.  It’s one of the secondary perks of Sam’s job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Perks Of The Job

**Author's Note:**

> A succession of short scenes set in and around the third episode and prompted by a random thought. What does a cabinet crisis look like from a position at Malcolm Tucker’s side? Oh, and I’m assuming his background is that of most recent political “media managers”!

She didn’t have to ask. Although her desk was down the passageway from his office, one of several in an open plan secretarial space, Sam Cassidy could make out every furious word he shouted no matter how righteous indignation thickened his natural Glaswegian burr. “Sam! Cancel everything ‘til further notice, yeah? Anybody wants me I’m over at Social Affairs murdering the fucking minister!”

“Pity,” said Susan, the permanent Downing Street official at the desk facing hers. “He’s a nice chap, Hugh Abbot.”

“Don’t worry, Malcolm’ll work his way round to killing Fatty eventually.” She glanced up at him as he charged past, head down, Blackberry pinned as usual to his ear. “So much for the housing bill being a triumph! I thought Malcolm had told him to get rid of that bloody flat!”

*

If ministers did as they were told, he often pointed out, their jobs would be fucking boring. And as calls began to flood the switchboard – most of them diverted to her as P.A. to the Director of Communications – from every newspaper and broadcaster in Britain, Sam came to the conclusion that boring would, just once in a while, be something worth trying. She knew long before he burst back through the posh entrance that Abbot was quite probably toast, always assuming Malcolm hadn’t already ground him up and used his bones for the flour to make the bread for said toast. “The P.M. asks if you can go straight through and brief him,” she announced with reluctance, knowing that news would make a bad afternoon even worse.

He didn’t try to bite off the inevitable profanity. “Fuck! Abbot’s coming over in the morning, Sam; cancel everything between nine and ten, OK? Tell Jamie, any press enquiries, they can fuck off and we’ll comment when we’re fuckin’ ready. The flat’s been sold to the Asian family, so they can stop making their fuckin’ silly offers. Afternoon, Susan.”

“Mister Tucker.” That wouldn’t improve his mood either; from the cleaners to the administrators he preferred first-name terms, reserving formality for the classes he really disliked.

Politicians. Civil servants. And – even though he’d been one himself in a previous life – journalists.

*

“Jesus _Christ_! How do they manage to wipe their fuckin’ arses without somebody there to guide their fucking hands?” The Monkton report lay open on his desk but if he’d read more than the précis Sam would be amazed. Official inquiries produced thirty pages, minimum. Malcolm read at the same pace he did everything else – flat out – be even he wouldn’t have had time to digest the lot before the top came off the Scottish volcano.

“I assume it’s not good?” she said, holding out a fresh cup of steaming hot coffee in front of her like a centurion’s shield. Momentarily she saw mirth flash through his eyes, a mute acknowledgement of the gesture.

“Heads are gonna roll this time, Sam. The one thing we don’t need is another fucking excuse for a reshuffle! You’d think the cunt would’ve learned by now: if you’re _going_ to do something fuckin’ stupid, don’t discuss it in front of your fucking driver!”

“Whoops.” Abbot was one of the Cabinet’s nonentities – a faceless shadow who flitted by her desk on the way to a bollocking from her boss – but he was at least relatively harmless. 

Brainless, Sam conceded ruefully. The inoffensive ones usually were.

Not that the press found Hugh Abbot’s empty second home innocuous. And Malcolm – well, he’d been on a tear about it ever since the storm had broken five days before. If the minister hadn’t blithely ignored a warning, issued several weeks beforehand in this very building, she suspected the Director of Communications would currently be communicating a far happier line.

“I need Glenn Cullen, Terri Coverley and that streak of weak piss Ollie over here as soon as – no, don’t worry I’ll call them, you just clear my diary for half an hour after they arrive, OK? If I’m still with the boss, call me.”

Heads, he had said. _Heads_ were going to roll. Not necessarily a specific head.

Well, if that self-absorbed prick Reeder took the fall, Sam wouldn’t be complaining. He was a choice representative of his type, an over-promoted Oxbridge brat with more ambition than principle, dragged out of party headquarters by a junior minister easily impressed by bullshitters. 

As most of them, in her experience, were.

She very deliberately didn’t offer the three chastened DSA staff refreshments when they trooped, like kiddies called to Teacher’s office, up to her desk. “He’s still with the Prime Minister – no, don’t worry, I’ll give him a call,” she said sweetly, watching their mouths fall open at the enormity of the announcement. By the time she showed them into his office, carefully keeping the door wide open to earwig (excellent hearing being just one of the assets she had brought to her job) Sam almost felt sorry for them.

Malcolm didn’t stop to ask about their mood when he escaped the P.M, but he flashed her a quick, wolfish grin when Susan’s back was turned that told her everything. Abbot was safe. The terror of a forced reshuffle had a way, apparently, of focussing the master’s mind on the survival of his minions.

*

He poked his head out of the office when the Social Affairs crew shuffled away, requesting a decent cup of tea with the courtesy that always made visitors stop and stare, aware they never received a fraction of it themselves no matter how high-ranking they might be. Sam knew the code. When she carried it through she pulled the door firmly shut behind her and relaxed into a smile, bumping her hip against the desk as she set his mug down safely to the side of his disorderly sheaves of paperwork. “So: which of them’ll do the decent thing?” she asked bluntly.

Reclining in his big black chair, Malcolm waved a long, thin hand across his face. “Fuck knows, there’s not much decency between the three of them,” he said, continuing the gesture until his arm had stretched to its full extent and those long, elegant fingers curled around her wrist, gently drawing her closer. Sam swayed around the edge of the desk and perched herself comfortably to his right, leaning down from her rare position of height advantage to brush a kiss across his furrowed brow. 

The creases there smoothed under her tender touch and a small sigh escaped his tightly-thinned lips. “Why can’t the wankers just use their fuckin’ brains now and again, Sam?” he asked plaintively. “Are they _so_ dense?”

“So you always tell me.” Deliberately she angled herself so her blouse gaped, offering an enticing view of her cleavage while she stretched, running her fingers lightly through his greying hair. Malcolm’s mouth twitched.

“Very subtle,” he approved drily, his voice dropping a touch in response to the gentle, repetitive motion of her fingertips against his sensitive scalp. “Bollocks!”

This was why that staple of secretarial fantasy, the office seduction, had never happened and, Sam conceded, most likely never would. Her boss was far too much in demand for her to get halfway to first base before one or other of his phones would ring and break the spell.

Stealthily she slithered off the desk and crept away, leaving him already engrossed in the latest mini-crisis. He didn’t appear to notice as she quietly closed the door but Sam wasn’t offended. That same intensity of focus, later, would be diverted entirely toward her.

Her internal muscles spasmed in anticipation and for a moment she had to pause, resting her sweaty palm against the wall. In the meantime, maybe she could start a Social Affairs resignation sweepstake in the office!

*

She thought nothing of his discreet arrival; his low-voiced, earnest enquiry as to whether Malcolm was free was nothing she hadn’t heard half a dozen times a week from him since the P.M. had planted his foot on the first half-rotten rung of the ministerial ladder. Dan Miller liked to network. He knew who mattered, and he was not the man to let them forget about him.

“Thank you, Sam,” he intoned, hands clasped together while his head bobbed like a cathedral deacon approaching his congregation. “No, please don’t get up, I’ll introduce myself.”

Smug had never been smugger, even if he kept the ingratiating smirk off his face in favour of an unconvincing funereal air. Sam waited until his back was safely turned then rolled her shoulders through a sullenly teenager-type shrug. His visitor dismissed from her mind, she returned to the serous business of turning Malcolm’s expletive-spattered handwritten notes into a stern but publishable memo for transmission to all departments. Not everyone was as sanguine about his more colourful turns of phrase as she.

*

Before Miller left Abbot arrived, more hang-dog than a half-drowned beagle. Watching him pace up and down the narrow passageway between her desk and Malcolm’s door like a gloomy metronome was starting to make her feel faintly sick long before the heavily varnished door eased open and Dan Miller’s surprised voice greeted his putative boss. “Oh, seeing Malcolm, are you?”

Well, she thought sarcastically, what other reason would a minister have for loitering outside that particular office? She almost missed Abbot’s far too loud and solemn hail. “Malcolm, I’ve made a decision.”

_Five days too fucking late!_

Even in the privacy of her own head the words were tinged with an unmistakably Scots accent.

“Well, goodbye, Sam; and thanks for all the tea over the last few months.” Her hand was grasped in a too-firm grip, the pong of too much aftershave making her throat tighten as he leaned in that little bit too close, wide dark eyes fixed with unnerving solemnity on her face. “You never know – I may be back, one day.”

“Oh,” she said, the politeness instilled by a trenchantly middle-class, tea-at-the-vicar’s mother rising to cover her confusion. “I dare say so.”

Dan Miller’s forehead might have creased when he smiled but his eyes remained blank, untouched by its warmth. Her captive fingers received another, harder squeeze.

“Thank you. Yes, my coat, thank you, Susan. Goodbye.”

*

“So it’s Miller, then,” she said, rubbing her furrowed forehead as she surveyed the draft P.M.’s reply he had waiting for her. “But I didn’t think he had anything to do with…”

“He’s got a future, that fucker, and he knows it.” For a man who had scrawled such flattering phrases on his notepad, Malcolm didn’t look convinced. In fact he looked (not, Sam acknowledged, for the first time) monumentally hacked off.

“A dazzlingly bright, talented, honourable and committed new force in British politics… extremely sorry to lose you… predict you will one day find yourself in very high office indeed,” she quoted, following his pacing from the corner of her eye. “That’s not the usual style. _If_ you don’t mind my saying.”

He grunted. “Boss thinks the shifty little tosser shites polished turds. And he’s bright, I’ll give him that – resign now, carry the can for Abbot’s fuck-up and his reputation for integrity’s made. With thinking like that he’ll be party fuckin’ leader inside five years.”

His eyes narrowed. Dead in front of her Malcolm came to a stop, the energy that always crackled around him making the hairs at the back of her neck prickle uncomfortably. “What do you make of him?”

Resentment. He bristled with it, greenish sparks flaring in his usually cool grey eyes as he studied her like a biologist over a microscope, peering for the smallest trace of an involuntary reaction. Sam laughed.

“I’m sure he’ll come across well on the telly but for God’s sake don’t let him near any female under eighty with more than a couple of spare brain cells! He’s got all the charisma, face-to-face, of a dead slug.”

“You reckon?” Nobody else would detect it, but Sam registered the minimal softening of his hostile stance. She nodded.

“He’s the type the press will swoon over – a Botox poster-boy who’ll smile at the old ladies and stick to his scripted soundbites. Some women’ll go for it – the _oooh, hasn’t he got nice eyes_ types’ll think the smile’s for real. Others’ll tell you he’s a slimy second-hand car dealer with a knock-off Rolex.”

“I’ve heard that kind of thing about the boss, too.”

“Exactly.”

He should have reprimanded the insolence – even she wasn’t allowed to cast aspersions against the Prime Minister – but Malcolm couldn’t raise the requisite level of ire. “Mind you, we don’t let him do that _spontaneous interaction_ shit unless we have to.”

“And you drill him for an hour before every bloody walkabout. How much is a pint of milk, Prime Minister? Who’s doing Strictly Come Dancing this year? Who scored the only goal in the Cup Final – and who does he play for? How did the last poor sod to snuff it in Eastenders die? I bet Miller will know all that stuff. He’s that type.”

“Not your type, then.” The relief was palpable.

“Christ, no!” 

Sam had never thought of her employer – her lover – as an insecure man. Quite the opposite: Malcolm Tucker exuded both the professional and sexual confidence of the supreme alpha male, a man utterly at ease in his own skin and impervious to the threat of other, lesser mortals. This sudden hint of uncertainty, all of it focussed on her, shook her to the core.

“My _type_ ,” she said coolly, letting the sheet of paper flutter from her fingers, “is tall, slim, Scottish and straight as the proverbial fucking die. I like a man with _real_ confidence and a good, firm handshake; not the type who has to squash your fingers to a pulp to show you what a big man he is. Dear God, Malcolm! How could you think any woman with a brain could even look at a slimeball like Dan Miller when you’re around?”

“I’m no’ bothered about any other woman, lass.” Warmth infused his low, smoky voice, making a melody of that rich Glaswegian brogue as he moved forward to – wonders would never cease – draw her tenderly into a loose embrace. “As long as you’re not squealin’ like the P.M. over Danny Boy’s every fuckin’ smirk, that’s all I need to know.”

“You’re a daft sod sometimes, but I still love you.” Now wasn’t the moment to glory in stirring the jealously of the man half Whitehall was convinced had a chunk of granite for a heart. Not in front of him, at any rate.

She couldn’t prevent a small internal preen, however, as she snuggled into his arms right in the middle of his office. Her friends envied her being at the very heart of government; joked about her ringside seat during every periodic crisis. They had no idea about the greatest perk of all.

Malcolm’s lips brushed through her hair. Discovering the man behind the media myth that was Downing Street’s Dark Knight. That was the real privilege of Samantha Cassidy’s job.


End file.
